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Bridging the Philosophies of Biology and Chemistry CALL FOR PAPERS First International Conference on Bridging the Philosophies of Biology and Chemistry 25-27 June 2019 University of Paris Diderot, France Extended Deadline for Abstract Submission: 28 February 2019 The aim of this conference is to bring philosophers of biology and philosophers of chemistry together and to explore common grounds and topics of interest. We particularly welcome papers on (1) the philosophy of interdisciplinary fields between biology and chemistry; (2) historical case studies on the disciplinary divergence and convergence of biology and chemistry; and (3) the similarities and differences between philosophical approaches to biology and chemistry. Philosophy is broadly construed and includes epistemological, methodological, ontological, metaphysical, ethical, political, and legal issues of science. For a detailed description of possible topics, please see below and visit the conference website http://www.sphere.univ-paris-diderot.fr/spip.php?article2228&lang=en Instructions for Abstract Submission Submit a Word file including author name(s), affiliation, paper title, and an abstract of maximum 500 words by 28 February 2019 to Jean-Pierre Llored ([email protected]) . Registration If you are interested in participating, please register by sending an e-mail to Jean-Pierre Llored ([email protected]) before 30 April 2019. Venue Room 454A, Building Condorcet, University Paris Diderot, 4, rue Elsa Morante, 75013 Paris, France Sponsors CNRS; Laboratory SPHERE, Laboratory LIED, and Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Paris Diderot; Fondation de la Maison de la Chimie; Free University of Brussels; University of Lille Organizers Cécilia Bognon, Quentin Hiernaux, Jean-Pierre Llored, Joachim Schummer First international Conference on Bridging the Philosophies of Biology and Chemistry 25-27 June 2019, University of Paris Diderot, France Description Background For much of the twentieth century, philosophy of science had almost exclusively been focused on physics and mathematics. Other scientific disciplines were considered only in case studies that should support ideas of so-called general philosophy of science, which was largely a debate on the progress of physics, and especially of theoretical physics, across the conceptual shifts from classical mechanics to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Dissatisfied with that one-sided focus on physics, scientists, historians of science, and philosophers, usually with a background in another discipline, developed philosophical approaches to other sciences in the late 20th century. Philosophy of biology emerged in the 1970s, philosophy of chemistry in the early 1990s, and many others would follow soon. Nowadays almost all larger scientific disciplines have their own philosophies, which are largely disconnected from each other. 1 They each explore conceptual, epistemological, methodological, ontological, metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, etc. issues of their particular discipline. This situation was foreseen by Bachelard who once stated that “[e]ach interesting problem, each experiment, or even each equation required a philosophical reflection of its own”.2 Apart from the common involvement in philosophies of new interdisciplinary fields, such as nanotechnology and bio- nanotechnology, and sometimes in the framework of ethics committee as well, the interaction between philosophers of different disciplines is much underdeveloped. As a result, philosophers belonging to one domain usually ignore a great part of the work done by their colleagues in another domain, which prevents them from studying the way those sciences influence one another, and from implementing new research cooperations, which could turn out to be of importance in order for them to scrutinize those sciences from a philosophical standpoint. After a period of the emergence of various philosophies of sciences it appears overdue to take not only stocks but also to find new ways to connect the manifold philosophical approaches. This workshop, which is the first of its kind, aims at building bridges between the philosophies of biology and chemistry by exploring common grounds or topics of interest on both the level of philosophical approaches and the level of interdisciplinary fields between biology and chemistry. Intermediary/interdisciplinary fields There are various interdisciplinary research fields bridging biology and chemistry, e.g. biochemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, biomimetic chemistry, geochemistry, medicinal chemistry, pharmacy, (eco)toxicology, molecular biology, chemical ecology, synthetic biology, chemical evolution (historical origin of preforms of life), supramolecular chemistry, medicine, and environmental science. Furthermore, many chemical projects and teams are now integrated into biology departments in universities all over the world and thus depend on them. In addition, methods and tools originating from ecology and biology, as for instance the life cycle analysis, are now used by green chemists who are gradually learning how to use and improve it in order to integrate eco-conceptions in chemistry. This double context, first of the emergence and stabilization of a wide range of intermediary and interdisciplinary fields entangling biology and chemistry, and second of the reorganization of the chemical research done in biology 1Fritz Allhoff (ed.), Philosophies of the Sciences: A Guide , Blackwell-Wiley, 2010; Thomas Reydon & Simon Lohse (eds.): Grundriss Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Die Philosophien der Einzelwissenschaften , Hamburg: Meiner, 2017. 2 Bachelard Gaston, The Philosophy of No , Trans. G. C. Waterson, New York: Orion, 1968, p. 40. [ La philosophie du non: Essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940.] 2 Bridging the Philosophies of Biology and Chemistry departments, requires new philosophical investigations at least in order to check how, and to what extent, this new coexistence changes the way biology and chemistry are currently done. Following this line of thought, philosophers could address specific issues, among them are: (1) Biologists have supplied mechanistic descriptions of proteins (macromolecules) as nanomachines. More recently, a statistical description of protein folding and protein transconformation has become dominant. Has a similar transformation also occurred in chemistry? More and more chemists are working on ‘biological objects’. Does it mean that the boundary between biology and chemistry is presently shifting? (2) How do intermediary and interdisciplinary new domains or practices bridge biology and chemistry? (3) Which disciplinary perspectives and resources do they combine? (4) Do they develop new, intermediary concepts that are independent of both biology and chemistry or do they recombine existing concepts in a creative manner? (5) How are the different inferences drawn from chemical and biological experiments integrated into one report in order to address a specific question? (6) Do those interactions transform chemical and biological types of reasoning and do they transform the way the practitioners give sense to what they do, and if so in what manner? (7) Can those interactions be usefully described and understood by Kuhn’s, Lakatos’s, Popper’s or any other received description of the way knowledge evolves in science? Or, by contrast, do they pave the way for a new understanding of the production, stabilization, and evolution of scientific knowledge? Epistemological and methodological issues Another group of issues about which the workshop aims to provide insigthts deals with the differences and resemblances between both the types of knowledge and methods used by chemists and biologists in their specific laboratories. To do so, we will ask the following questions: (1) Biology and chemistry stand out among all the sciences by having developed the by far most powerful classifications, including taxonomies and the periodic table of elements. What are the commonalities and differences of these classifications and their underlying concepts of species, property, similarity, supporting theories, etc.? (2) Are biology and chemistry each striving for a unified and reductionist master theory, such as physics, or do they follow methodological pluralism of a variety of models tailored to certain epistemic needs and based on interdisciplinary exchanges? (3) Do biology and chemistry differ in their way of developing and stabilizing concepts, models, theories, nomenclatures, pictures and representations, instruments, and laboratories? Do they have different forms of experimentation, explanation, representation, and prediction? Do they differ in their use of quantitative concepts and the degree of mathematization? Following this line of questioning, a comparison between the representations (of processes and objects) in chemistry and biology would be particularly interesting. (4) A recent trend in biology has been to focus on ‘systems’ (systems biology) and to reject the previous forms of reductionism. Sytemic approaches are developed in chemistry as well, as it is the case for instance in green chemistry and supramolecular chemistry. Is it possible to establish a parallel between those activities? Are ‘systems’ defined and understood in the same way by biologists and chemists? What is the epistemological status of such ‘systems’? How is this notion related to that of ‘network’ in biological and chemical research programs? Are systems and networks
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